


sight unseen

by mortalitasi



Series: hil do lok [2]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Bittersweet, F/M, General
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-24 14:24:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13215648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: Alduin eventually learns that a civil question gets a civil answer, and maybe even a civil conversation.This is one of those resulting conversations.





	sight unseen

“How do you do it?“  
  
The Dragonborn’s hands come to a stop from where they are working on darning her cloak and her eyes cut up to him, quiet and guarded, the color of red gems in the low lanternlight of the hall. A long silence stretches out between them, making him wish he hadn’t asked the question at all. He wouldn’t answer, if he were her—it’s been only two days since the last time he tried to kill her, and two days since another miserable failure.  
  
This body is weak, fragile, easy to tire, quick to temptation, and endlessly frustrating. Too many fingers. Too many joints. Too many liabilities. He’s only now mastered the act of walking without stumbling like some soft-brained fool, but he still fumbles with the things the mortals call forks and all their unnecessary implements—boots for running, clothes to keep warm, spoons for liquid, gourds for water—they are always hurrying, scuttling, never settling. Half of them don’t know what they truly want. The Dragonborn is as lost as any one of them, and she has the privilege to claim dov heritage.  
  
The bosmer studies him for another moment and then lays the cloak down on her crossed legs, letting it pool in her lap.  
  
"How do I do what?” she says slowly, watching as his fingers curl around his knees. They’d been curled around her throat not too long ago.  
  
The words come hesitantly and clumsily to him. The mortal tongue is cumbersome and costly, not compact and steady like the speech of his brothers, and now he has to rely on it all the time. “How do you… exist in such a way?”  
  
She tilts her head at him as though she does not understand, and the sharp motion reminds him of the little things called eagles that often fly behind a dov on the hunt, waiting for morsels that do not have to be earned.  
  
“I have known nothing else,” she says, shrugging, and pulls her hair over one of her shoulders. Another strange, unneeded part of mortality he cannot escape—hair. It seems that all the small creatures have it. Even the _trolls_.  
  
He watches as she continues to stitch up the tear in her cloak with swift, methodical strokes, begrudging her in his mind for the meticulous control of such a tiny action. She makes it look fluid, effortless: he would consider himself lucky if his bumbling hands could hold a dish.  
  
“It is for the best,” he says, remembering the fury that beset him when he’d realized what had been taken from him in its entirety. He had blamed her. He does blame her. He still recalls the way the skin on his hands had cooled when she’d ripped his grip open and then knocked him off his feet with little more than a lazy kick. The flesh on his arms prickles with goosebumps. How acutely this vessel feels the heat and the cold, real or imagined—how feeble it is. It infuriates him.  
  
The Dragonborn glances at him with wary eyes as she pulls the string into a last knot. She fingers the new stitches on her cloak for an instant before she moves it aside and then leans back, regarding him with barely-concealed curiosity that makes a spark of dislike jump up in him. He is made to inspire awe and fear, he, the Firstborn, created in the very image of Father Akatosh himself, and yet here he is, on level ground with the _joor_. Wingless. Grounded. Crude.  
  
Lesser.  
  
The lantern swings, its handle creaking, the sound lonely and too loud for the dark hallway. Shadows dance on the Dragonborn’s legs.  
  
“You cannot understand,” he says, it being an afterthought more than anything. How can one hope to explain shapes that do not exist to the mortal eye, or the song of the wind on high when you take to the sky in the morning and the heat of the day is just rising?  
  
There are no words in any tongue to describe the swell of the clouds beneath your wings or the scattering of sunrays and yellow light as you cut through the dawn and cling to the mountainside with the first ice of winter in your mouth and stone crumbling beneath your claws.  
  
He almost pities them, those here on the earth. Sad, colorless beasts, they are. Pathetic. He lets his head loll back until it touches the wall. He remains there, eyes fixed on the ceiling he cannot see.  
  
“Maybe it is merciful that you do not. You would be driven to madness."  
  
For him, it has already begun.

 

* * *

 

He never questioned how she had made it to Skuldafn till the day she turns to him and simply says, "I _do_ know what it's like."  
  
He only looks at her as though she's lost her head and continues making his way down the hall, feeling a small burble of confidence fizz up in him when she pauses in surprise at his assured movements. She catches up too quickly for his liking, but that will be rectified in time.  He still blunders a little when he puts the cloak on, and it makes him growl under his breath. His nails are longer than any mortal he has seen on his stay on the peak, and they turn tying a simple knot into a nightmare.  
  
He's still struggling with the laces when she speaks again. "How do you think I made my way to Skuldafn? We flew."

 

* * *

   
  
_She clings to the spikes curving up and away from Odavhiing's back. They're surprisingly warm against her skin, smooth and worn with centuries of weather and life. She's sitting in the junction between wing and back where leathery skin dips into the socket of his side. He turns his great head in profile, the yellow of his eye so pure and consuming she has a hard time looking away._  
  
_The plains around Whiterun stretch out for miles all about them, endless and shifting. She feels her heart jump in her chest, fear and joy and a feeling of familiarity and belonging that burns in her like dragonfire. Odavhiing shifts and she clutches harder, clenching her thighs around his neck. The scales don't chafe as much as she expected them to. It's hard to breathe._  
  
_"Are you ready, Dovakhiin?"_  
  
_His voice rumbles through her like the slow roll of thunder during a winter storm. She sucks in a startled breath when he shifts and the edges of his leathery wings catch and flare against the wind. Dragonsreach suddenly seems painfully small compared to the rest of the world. Odavhiing takes a step forward and the encroaching gust of wind blows her hair back, tearing it away from her face, ripping the cowl down off her head; strands of her braid come loose and whip around her cheeks, but she's too exhilarated to feel the sting._  
  
_"Yes," she says, leaning forward as the dragon moves his weight from one foot to the other. His scent wafts over her—it's hot, like metal on the forge, and tinny, but heady like cinnamon and nutmeg, and all at once she knows that this is what has been missing all her life. The ache, the void, the not knowing, it's all gone. She could laugh. Or cry._  
  
_It's like he knows what she's thinking. A rattling like the crackle of pebbles rolling around in a wooden mug starts up below her, and it's many moments before she realizes the gravelly sound is Odavhiing laughing. He moves his head away, arching his neck, and spreads his wings—_ _every glorious yard of them, high and open and ready to climb the sky._  
  
_Odavhiing walks to the edge of Dragonsreach, the drumming of his heart hammering through her veins and arms until it's all she can hear in her ears. The wind roars past them, but she hears him speak anyway._  
  
_"Hold on!"_  
  
_He takes another step and all the colors of the world blur together in a downward spiral. She feels the muscles in Odavhiing's shoulders pull when the updraft pushes up against his wings but has no voice to yell with when. Then they're falling, her heart is flying, and then, and then_ _—_

 

* * *

   
  
"'We'?" He turns to look at her, unblinking, but she doesn't flinch. Only stares at him with her unsettling eyes and her high mer brow unmoving.  
  
"What do you think you're doing?"  
  
She will tell him in time who she meant by saying 'we,' though he has his suspicions. Alduin is no stranger to betrayal. Any worthy leader has enemies.  
  
"Getting dressed."  
  
The Dragonborn watches him with ice in her stare as he draws gloves _—_ the biggest she could find in Hrothgar's wardrobes _—_ over his grey hands. He feels clumsy with these things on, unlike himself, but it had been made very  clear in the plainest terms that if he did not take the pains to conceal himself, getting off this blasted mountain would remain absolutely nothing but a fantasy. When he knows the workings of this vessel well enough, this concealment will not be needed. And neither will _she_.  
  
"I can see that well enough," the bosmer says, not sounding at all amused. "And where are you planning on going?"  
  
He hisses between his teeth, sharp and unhappy.  "Anywhere."  
  
"That's a bit of a broad statement."  
  
The hatred in his eyes could have sloughed the flesh clean from her bones, were it possible. "Anywhere that isn't here. I do not care if you come with me. I do not care if I have to _walk_ every inch of the way to the other end of this forsaken land. I do not care about what you wish. I am leaving this mountain of monks and their rambling, half-mad traitor of a master behind." His breath is coming hard by the time he finishes the sentence, but the Dragonborn's expression has not changed any.  
  
"I believe you've made your point," she says coolly, crossing her arms. It makes the sharp line of her collar stand out against the fabric of her tunic, like the keel of a bird. He wonders if her bones are as easy to snap. "You're not going to make it very far."  
  
"You must be under the impression that I'm a child," he sneers at her, and a flicker of anger appears in her expression for just a moment before she stifles it.  
  
"No," the Dragonborn murmurs, "just mostly human."  
  
He could have killed her for that alone. But he only watches as she slips into her boots and then slides into her armor as though it is a second skin. She's tightening the cinches on her leather vest when he realizes he's staring, and that realization annoys him. He turns and starts off down the hallway without her, though he hears her following soon after.  
  
She's pulling her second glove over her hand as he starts down the stairs.  
  
"I look forward to traveling with you, too. By the Nine, what have I gotten myself into?"


End file.
